Lecture 8

I had intended by the time I reached this last lecture to have a fully worked out theory of spatial complexity. No such luck. This lecture was always going to be a catch-up and I thought I would talk about ABM but in the event, I decided to talk on LUTI – land use transportation interaction models – and how these illustrate spatial and visual complexity. Coupling models together if these models can be derived by maximising spatial or Shannon entropy adds to our repertoire of measures – and as yet no one to my knowledge has even begun to measure the complexity of these models. The complexity of these models of course is not the same as the complexity of the real world as models are inevitably simplification and complexity is hardly simplification. But there is a nice play here on abstraction, complexity and simplicity and in this lecture, I show how complex systems need to be constructed in a manner that makes them intelligible, at least I think I do. Contained therein are also ideas on making models fast and visual as well as accessible and detailed.

Here is the lecture. Click on the Full-text PDF size: 1874Kb – it is biggish – or on the adjacent image. The lecture was first given on Wednesday 2nd November and posted the same day. I have also now added the link on the front page sidebar to my lectures here last year which were on land use models. The Bibliography page hasn’t yet been updated yet but it will happen, of course, once I surface.